The text-based critical method of the formalist critics was accepted in the United States because they are parallel with the concerns of so called New Critics who focused on the overall structure and verbal texture of literary works, such as imagery, metaphor, and other qualities of a literary language apart from both historical setting and biographical information about the author. In the 1940s, when Russian linguist Roman Jakobson and Czech literary theorist René Wellek settled at the Harvard University and the Yale University, respectively, the study of literature in North America had been greatly influenced by the work of Cleanth Brooks and other New Critics. Like his British contemporary, Sir William Empson, Brooks applied the skill of close reading chiefly to the analysis of ironies, paradoxes, and ambiguities in individual texts.
New critics acknowledge that “the words on the page” are the basis for any analysis of any piece of literature - the raw material from which any ideas or argument must necessarily come. But, the analysis rarely stops with close reading; that close reading shows us something, not only about the construction of the text, but about the author, the reader, the social context of the author, the social context of the reader, and about the methods of interpretation available to authors and readers.
POST STRUCTURALISM
The 1960s saw a revolution in literary theory. During this decade, New Criticism dominated the literary world with the assumption that one interpretation of a text could be discovered. Believing that a text contained its meaning within itself, New Critics paid little attention to its historical context. For the New Critics, the meaning of a text was bound to the ironies, paradoxes, and ambiguities found within the structure of the text. By analyzing the text alone, New Critics believe that an intelligent critic could identify the central ironies, paradoxes, and ambiguities of the text and could explain how the text ultimately resolved these without sacrificing its general theme. Unlike the New Critics, Jacques Derrida, the founding father of deconstruction, denied the objective existence of a text. Disavowing the basic assumption of New Criticism, Derrida and other post structural critics challenged the definitions and assumptions of reading and writing, and from a philosophical perspective, asked what it means to read and to write.
Unlike the New Critics who believed that the language of literature was somehow different from the language of science and everyday conversation, post structural critics assumed that the language of the text is not distinct from the language used to analyze it. In other words, the language used in textual analysis and literary criticism helps form and shape the text being analyzed and criticized. The text and the language cannot be separated, and the language helps create objective reality.
Believing that objective reality can be created by language, post structural critics assumed that all reality is a social construction, and from this point of view, they assumed that there is no objective reality. According to post structural critics, each culture has a dominant group who determines an ideology or hegemony. All people in a given culture are consciously and unconsciously asked to conform to the prescribed ideology or hegemony.
What happens when one's ideas, one's thinking, and one's personal background do not conform? For the blacks living in Africa and the Americas, the traditional answer has been silence. Live quietly, work quietly, and think quietly. The message sent has been clear: conform and be quiet, deny yourself and everything will be well.
But, many have not been quiet. Alice Walker, Edward Said, Franz Fanon, Toni Morrison, Gayatri Spivak, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez had continued to challenge the dominant cultures. Defying the dominant culture, they believe that the ethics, values, and view of life of an individual do not matter. They did not believe with one culture, one perspective, and one interpretation of life.
Post structuralism has three approaches: post colonialism, African-American criticism, and gender studies. Although each group has its own concern, all seek after the same thing: to be heard and to be understood as valuable members of society. Because, post structuralists believe that their past and future are intricately interwoven, they also believe that by suppressing their past, their future is also suppressed. Often called subaltern writers, a term, used by Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist critic, which refers to the classes who are not in control of a culture's ideology or hegemony, they provide new ways to see and understand cultural forces at work in literature.
POSTCOLONIALISM
Postcolonialism concerns itself with literature or literatures written in colonized countries like Asia, Africa, Australia, and South America. Often called third-world literature, postcolonialism investigates what happens when two cultures clash and when one of them with its accompanying ideology deems itself superior than the other.
